But California also has a unique factor, proposition 13. [3] This drastically disincentives people from moving. Palo Alto has the lowest property tax rates in the state.[4] Why move when you will pay significantly more monthly. This is especially pertinent to retirees. So no one moves which destroys market liquidity. Combine this with NIMBYism, an over abundance of protected lands, rent control, affordable housing measures and piss poor public transportation, and you get the shit storm that is the Bay Area housing market. Tech is simply a convenient excuse. There’s a reason California is building a bullet train between SF and LA, but no public transportation from the east bay to the peninsula which would help an enormous number of workers and the environment. Despite lofty rhetoric, people vote their self interests.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/bank-of-japans-50-billion-quest... [2] https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-09-11/wtf-chart-day-boj-... [3] https://medium.com/@michaellevinson_64108/landlords-and-heir... [4] https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/12/01/high-priced-californi...
Absolutely though Prop 13 hurts liquidity in California though. There's a lot of factors, nobody can agree on them, so we're stuck with this massively overheated market.
However, these windfall gains can be recycled into public coffers via the tax system and lighten tax burdens on productive activity.
As a nice bonus, it would make it much harder to be an idle landlord in a prime area... the physical equivalent of a patent troll.
How do you define "fairness" in this context?
* Edited to less confrontational question.
In fact, by effectively being a tollbooth operator upon the prerequisites for economic development they are an active hindrance. Land titles are necessary, but it is not necessary that they keep the land rent, only the improvement values that they are responsible for.
Seattle is catching up with the other big cities, but it's still lower cost. Especially given how new the buildings are.
But tech is where the demand comes from. The median home price in Santa Clara county is almost $1.3M, and ~20% of residents can afford that price. Those are tech workers.
Supply has been steadily decreasing for years and years, so I don't see that problem getting solved. Therefore I think we'd need to see a significant drop in the tech industry for prices to slow down.
One of the reasons we got the dot-com bubble, even though the Fed was aware of it, was that they were more afraid of instability from the emerging markets than a domestic bubble. That fear was certainly justified, but nonetheless the dot-com bubble was still enormous.
Asheville, NC is coming up after Colorado - I've got one friends-couple that's actively moving there this summer, and a couple others that are thinking seriously about it.
> I wonder what this all will look like when we look back 20 years hence
There was an interesting throwaway comment in Carlota Perez's Technical Revolutions and Financial Capital (written in 2002). She's famous for her observation that each technological revolution tends to lead to a financial crisis that separates the "Installation" phase (governed by financial capital, and marked by successive asset bubbles & widening wealth inequality) from the "Deployment" phase (governed by production capital, and marked by a widespread dissemination of best practices and corresponding productivity gains throughout the economy).
Less famously, the book also mentions that towards the end of the "frenzy" period (the latter half of the Installation phase), you get a phenomena of "two monies". Any prices connected to the new means of production - stock values, salaries, real estate in key cities, etc. - grow exponentially, while the old economy remains stagnant. Eventually, the divide leads to war, with regions that have adopted the new production techniques battling rump states of the old declining empires. That's as far as the book goes, but the historical implication - based on the early 20th century examples of the Ottoman Turks, Czarist Russia, Imperial China & feudal Japan - is that societies that cling to the old ways collapse, and their leadership is exterminated. Those who aren't killed and who are adaptable enough to adopt new techniques find places within the victorious societies, which then start focusing their efforts on spreading the new production techniques widely within the society to equalize social divisions and cement the new order. Think of the GI Bill after WW2, the widespread suburbanization, mass production of the automobile, consumer goods, department stores, the Civil Rights Act, and so on.
Yet I still moved to the crowded and insane Bay Area because jobs. In FL I was always running that risk that if my current job didn’t work out I’d have few remaining options. And in today’s tough hiring market, where you have to apply to 100 jobs to get 10 interviews to get 1 offer, having few employers around is a massive risk. It’s why I’m forced to stay out in the SF area.
https://github.com/lukeschlather/load-king-county-assessor-d...
Most folks working at local medium-large businesses seem to get price-reduced orca cards for their daily commute.
I think if you moved to the city post 2010, you probably don't realize what "old Seattle" was like.
Who are these other "culturally important folk" and why are they so important? Not denying they exist, I just don't know who you are talking about.
I still see a lot of opportunity for middle (or possibly upper-middle) class families to live in Seattle although it is not easy. It seems a lot easier than SFO and entirely within reach to me. Something should be done to make sure this stays within reach but we have to be realistic about how that looks. A single family home on a 1/4 acre isn't gonna fly. You're probably going to be sharing at least one wall with someone.
You are echoing the concern I hear often and I have no doubt that you feel what you are describing but I'm just not convinced that it reflects reality.
I lived in Seattle for the summer of 2009 and while I didn't explore a lot of it back then I don't think it has changed much culturally. I hear the "it's an old Seattle thing you wouldn't understand" cliche a lot too. I'm just surprised nobody can articulate what was different then.
Change is just constant I guess.
I visited with my girlfriend in 2015 and stayed in the suburbs where her girlfriend's guy was working for MS. The burbs seemed pretty peaceful and green (older suburb—but I don't know the city). Maybe they were in Redmond proper.
It was a beautiful area, and I could definitely live with that. It's too bad it's pricing people out like that.
We were there only too briefly so we just hit some touristy options like the market and some hipster arcade bar, the Army/Navy, etc.
We live in Toronto and it felt pretty similar overall (though I'd give major points to Seattle for scenery). The same thing is ultimately happening here, too, though. Rents are skyrocketing but wages aren't.
With a lot of the political commotion and the desire for more outdoors activity, I haven't seen much of Canada mentioned in this thread and I'm curious if its landed on the map for anybody. And where?
If other countries are up for comparison, I would really love to move to Brisbane someday.
If I left Seattle (and the US) it would be for something completely different like Taipei.
I’m also a bit too patriotic to move out of the US while I can still build a life here.
Of course, that's true of a lot of US cities that are growing these days. Certainly NYC or Boston were much grittier in the 80s/90s than they are today with a net outflow of population.
Also,
> There's an art gallery across the street from me. Many coffee shops and restaurants have locally created art for sale.
There's a ton of those in SF, too. Gentrifiers enjoy the old culture and all its signifiers; that's why they moved there in the first place. (IDK what you mean by street performers but there sure aren't those in SF.)
I’m not sure how to reconcile “all the artists are leaving” with “gentrifiers like art” and the presence of many forms of art all over the place. Which is it? Are artists not supposed to sell art? I really don’t get it.
Grunge didn’t really start here, it just blew up here. It’s more of a Pacific Northwest thing than a Seattle thing. If you ever come visit check out the Nirvana exhibit at MoPop (previously EMP), it does a great job explaining the evolution of grunge.
There are several local bands who are doing well on the national stage. The biggest is Macklemore although he’s not really my style.
The music scene in Seattle seems healthy to me, you can get a variety of shows any night of the week. The metal scene is supposed to be big but not my deal so I don’t know a lot about it.
I was at a backyard/underground wrestling show (hosted by a local band) last summer where the heel taunted the audience by telling them they’re a bunch of people who moved here 8 years ago and are mad at the people who moved here 5 years ago.
From where I sit Seattle has a multitude of healthy subcultures. It’s just fashionable to complain.
I'm trying to find it but there was this old video recording from either 1995 or 2005 (I don't remember which) of a Bob Dylan-ish parody song being performed on acoustic guitar and the lyrics were complaining about the exact same things back then that you hear complained about here today. As a matter of fact, don't move here if you can't handle complaining.
That town has stagnated and now it is dying. It is an oversimplification but I would rather deal with the problems of growth than stagnation and decay.
Better to be marginally less wealthy and free to live how I want than run the race by the rules of some coastal city for little benefit.
Be careful about romanticizing the idea of rural life if you haven’t already done it. It’s nothing special in my experience.
1. Rip up all city streets with jackhammers and sod the streets at once.... All public movement would be by foot and a fleet of bicycles, maintained by the city police force.
2. Change the name 'Aspen', by public referendum, to 'Fat City'. This would prevent greedheads, land-rapers and other human jackals from capitalizing on the name 'Aspen'.... These swine should be fucked, broken, and driven across the land.
3. Drug Sales must be controlled. My first act as Sheriff will be to install, on the courthouse lawn, a bastinado platform and a set of stocks in order to punish dishonest dope dealers in a proper public fashion. Each year these dealers cheat millions of people out of millions of dollars.... it will be the general philosophy of the Sheriff’s office that no drug worth taking should be sold for money.
4. Hunting and fishing should be forbidden to all non-residents, with the exception of those who can obtain the signed endorsement of a resident- who will then be legally responsible for any violation or abuse committed by the non-resident he has ‘signed for’…. By this approach-making hundreds or even thousands of individuals personally responsible for protecting the animals, fish and birds who live here-we would create a sort of de facto game preserve, without the harsh restrictions that will necessarily be forced on us if these blood-thirsty geeks keep swarming in here each autumn to shoot everything they see.
5. The Sheriff and his Deputies should never be armed in public. Every urban riot, shoot-out and blood-bath (involving guns) in recent memory has been set off by some trigger-happy cop in a fear frenzy.
6. It will be the policy of the Sheriff’s office savagely to harass all those engaged in any form of land-rape.
I'm sure there's 1000 economic and social reasons they can't be done, but damn if it doesn't sound good.
Boston's inner suburbs are full of this sort of stuff - walkable stores, small business and light industry, 2-5 story buildings for housing. And it all feels a lot like the old quarters of many European cities.
Part of the change is building materials and cars, I suppose - what was obvious in 1850 now has to be planned to outcompete highrises and cars-first layouts. But an awful lot of it is just not outlawing what people already do if you let them; Boston's livable old suburbs are basically all illegal today.
Points 1, 2, and 4 remind me of nothing so much as Abbey's stance on protecting the national parks: avoiding regulation via personal responsibility and barriers on idle, disinteresting consumption.
As I remember, his plan for the Grand Canyon was to put the last parking lot 5+ miles from the Canyon, with a bus line and a fleet of bicycles. You bike in (or take the bus, iff you've got a health reason not to bike), see the Canyon, then take a bus back out. No Canyon-side parking, less litter, no tourists seeking 5 minutes of photos, and no hucksters selling tickets for glass bridges or anything else. And yes, I seem to remember he wanted to keep names like "Hell's Half Mile" on everything possible, the better to limit demand.
A bit exclusionary, maybe, but sort of a nice vision given what we've got instead. (As far as I know, the park that came closest is Zion, and it's definitely better for having done so.)
This would put a stop to hordes of new residents from trashing places because it would give the existing residents time to react before the newcomers dominate local politics.
Experience/time considered in all sorts of contexts. The opinion of someone who's been doing something for years is more meaningful than that of someone who hasn't. Why don't we apply that to political representation. People who have been living somewhere for awhile probably have a better opinion on the future direction of that place than people who haven't.
In the 2000's was when we met, those who had grown up there and those who were moving were in the same age group. Only about 40% were college educated or in tech/programming oriented roles. Of those, a small amount has ridden the wave to prosperity. Most moved to Seattle (if looking for a career/home/etc), or Portland (if they pass the weird-test). There's been a steady trickle out of the Bay for anyone not in tech for the past decade, and now I think only 10% of them still remain. Now they're going to Colorado rather than Seattle, and a few more to Portland. Those that are currently missing the wave in Seattle are looking at moving to Colorado.
I have no idea which area is gonna be next - Colorado is now seen as the last "cool" place thats "affordable" and liberal (sorry screaming Coloradan's, you're next).
Personally, I just can't believe its gone on this long - the pressure release valve that I thought would be released from the bay every year for the last decade hasn't fully let go. Career or being able to afford a house seem to be mutually exclusive ideas if you're not in programming. This is creating a rather nomadic culture within my friend groups... welp, this area is too expensive, might as well move onto the next. Very few are putting down roots.
I wonder what this all will look like when we look back 20 years hence - was it really a bubble, or the creation of a permanent Elysium style class divide between those that had the capital (or took the risks) early, and those who didn't start out as well (or were conservative in leveraging themselves)? Every day it feels like I'm leading more towards the latter.